


Entanglement

by megolas



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 05:10:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megolas/pseuds/megolas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Entanglement is the ghostly bedrock on which their relationship is built</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trinityofone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/gifts).



Rodney is a physicist. He knows all the rules and relationships that bind him and his science, and he's broken half of them. Physics and mathematics are clean and, while no one could ever call them uncomplicated, they're complicated in ways that Rodney understands. Physics has laws and constants -- _For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction_ \-- with relationships and rules that provide a solid base that Rodney can use for everything else he does. They're clear in that respect.

His relationship to John Sheppard is anything but.

If Rodney looks at their relationship, he can apply different rules to John and himself. They're all pure expressions, easily applied in a beautiful dance of alphanumeric symbols and brackets. They work. In theory. But only when he removes the variables that make the relationship complex: namely, them.

Rodney applies these expressions to their relationship in the strangest places. ei π + 1 = 0 slips through his fingers above a forest on PX5-763 when he realises that the way John's fingers curve around the Puddlejumper's controls is still more beautiful than anything else. This despite the way that Euler's Relation states -- in ways that Rodney knows to be true -- that the concepts of one and zero are the same as the concepts of the exponential power: e, the imaginary number: i, and the irrational number: pi. He knows that you could visualise Euler's Relation as finding the viewpoint that fits the Grand Canyon, Mount Everest and Niagara Falls into one beautiful mathematical concept but try as he might, he can't make his variables fit that purity: something always wants to be different, more beautiful or more emotional, than the expression will accept.

He tries bringing in his first love after that, the heady mixture of equations and music that is a Fourier Transform. In the meeting room on Atlantis, mid-way through Elizabeth and Teyla discussing the upcoming harvest festival, he tries to apply the equation to the complex and intricate sound of their relationship and it seems to work. He teases apart each sound wave -- each a memory of touch or taste; John's fingers on the small of his back, correcting his stance in the firing range -- until he has the building blocks of the waveform scattered around him. But when he plays them one by one back into the intricate waveform, the result is discordant and the music lacks the soul it had before. As a child, he was told he did not possess this skill.

He tries to step back after that, turns his equations to the things that he knows work, the things that he knows will work would flow better than attempting to apply them to their relationship. Faraday and Ampere's laws are applied to the ZPM recharging project but are interrupted when John and his small trading team stumbles, bleeding, back through the 'gate, after what should have been a routine trading visit. John's in one piece but he's bruised and battered so Carson puts him on bed rest for a week and Rodney is incapable of concentrating fully for the entire time.

On the fifth day, Zelenka mutters in Czech and almost shoves him out of the lab, eyes kind behind the insults and warnings of dire consequences if Rodney tries to come back before he's ready to concentrate fully. Rodney informs him that he knows full well that Rodney rarely has to concentrate fully on anything, but hell has no fury like a Zelenka ignored and Rodney finds himself in the infirmary watching John charm the nurses into bringing him War and Peace and a Jello cup.

Rodney mentally catalogs the kinds of bonds that form between objects while John watches him from behind his book; two years gone and he's still reading War and Peace, although occasionally Rodney suspects that John's replaced the pages with weapon schematics or comic strips.

When Zelenka lets him back into the labs, Rodney finds post-it notes stuck to journals that weren't stuck there before. Some are attached to articles designed to make Rodney roll his eyes and mutter about the dangers of letting monkeys near typewriters, but the others are stuck to articles on Quantum Mechanics. Rodney was a theoretical physicist before he joined the SGC and he grins when the final post-it note is stuck to a page on mathematical photography, the crisp black of the equation sharp against the white background. The text below says _"Entanglement"_ and a careful hand has underlined _"Certain objects can become linked by a mysterious process called entanglement. Particles that become entangled are deeply connected regardless of the distance between them. If they become separated by the width of the Universe, the bond between them remains intact. These particles are so deeply linked that it's as if they somehow share the same existence."_

There's a moment of silence as the variables Rodney has carried around for so long click solidly into place, and then he pushes his fresh cup of coffee -- this one taken from his own private stash -- across to Zelenka and steps out of the labs. They're a universe apart from everything else, John and he, but Rodney can see how entanglement is the ghostly bedrock on which their relationship is built

**Author's Note:**

> This is the [equation for Quantum Entanglement](http://www.justinmullins.com/entanglement.htm) in the aforementioned mathematical photography. I really want a copy of this print. Faraday and Ampere's laws are part of [Maxwell's Equations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwells_equations) and deal with the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields, as well as their interactions with matter. A [Fourier Transform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_Transform) is an integral transform that re-expresses a function in terms of sinusoidal basis functions, i.e. as a sum or integral of sinusoidal functions multiplied by some coefficients ("amplitudes"). I ♥ wikipedia.
> 
> For Trin, on her birthday


End file.
